Newsletter Update
“Well… It’s Been a Minute!”
So, uh… remember our newsletter? Yeah, us neither! It’s been an embarrassingly long time since we’ve sent one out.
The last year has been focused on staying in business. We solely focused on keeping our shop (and our spirits) upright. It’s been tough, but we’re finding our footing again, and we figured it was high time to dust off the ol’ newsletter and say hi before y’all forgot we existed!
So grab a cup of... something, forgive our digital cobwebs, and stay tuned. We’ve got updates, new goodies, and plenty of stories and updates that will be coming your way. This update will include info about the struggle to avoid AI merchandise. The next newsletter will be more detailed like our previous updates.
Thanks for sticking with us — even when we disappeared longer than a sock in the dryer. 🧦❤️
The Hidden Problem with AI Merchandise
As a small family owned store, we’re constantly searching for affordable, unusual, eye-catching products to keep our shelves fresh and our customers interested. We prioritize selling art and wares by neurodivergent artists or companies that employ neurodivergent workers. We also sell art and wares from Asheville locals. We throw in any cool vintage we think people may like as well as oddities from our taxidermist friends and antique finds. Like many stores, we also rely on online vendors or wholesalers to supply new merchandise.
We spend a great amount of time trying to find things that you will not find in other stores and things that are of high interests to the neurodivergent. Recently, however, we’ve run into an unexpected problem — ordering items that look great online, only to get them delivered and discover they look nothing like the item in the wholesale catalogue and that they were designed by artificial intelligence.
This discovery has been frustrating. We had unknowingly invested in items that didn’t align with our store’s identity — we pride ourselves on authenticity, creativity, and supporting real artists. Instead, we ended up with products that feel soulless and impersonal. We end up stuck with merchandise and due to a year of financial struggles, we have had to try and get what we can for it and not order from those vendors again.
We know that our customers noticed too. A few regulars pointed out that the designs looked like AI. That kind of feedback hurts, especially when we have hundreds of unique products and someone finds a greeting card or a coffee mug that looks suspect and they give us a bad review based on one or two items in the store. We know that when shoppers suspect our merchandise isn’t original or thoughtfully designed, it damages the trust we’ve worked hard to build. Selling AI-generated products, even unintentionally, risks making us look careless or dishonest. For a small business trying to stay afloat, it’s hard to compete without accidentally engaging with AI somewhere in the process.
We hope that our customers will understand the learning curve of recognizing the flood of AI merchandise that has hit the market. We are working hard to vet our suppliers more carefully and prioritize transparency. We will continue to prioritize selling merchandise from verified artists and human designers, even if it costs more. Supporting genuine creativity keeps our store’s character intact — and our customers can feel the difference.
Thanks for reading this all the way through. Learning to navigate an AI saturated market is something we are still learning how to do and we appreciate your understanding as we get better at identifying AI generated products.
